May 24, 2007

'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' a noble attempt at telling a sad story

The film version of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" (which premieres 8 p.m. Sunday, HBO) has its work cut out for it.

It has a mere two hours and 15 minutes to condense several painful and bloody decades of 19th Century Native American history; the film opens with Little Big Horn and closes with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The paperback version of Dee Brown’s landmark 1971 book takes more than 450 pages to tell a much-expanded version of the same heartbreaking tale.

This new film also attempts to mix semifictional stories into the sad saga of the American government’s attempt to wrest South Dakota’s Black Hills from the Sioux and to “civilize” the Native American population, by any means necessary.

Adam Beach (“Flags of our Fathers”) plays Charles Eastman, whose tale is partly true, part invented. Eastman was a young Native American man whose father sent him away so that he could get an education (in the film, as a boy Eastman was present at Little Big Horn - which didn’t happen in real life). The Eastman of the film gets that education -- he works on a Sioux reservation as a doctor and is held up as a model of assimilation -- but he quickly loses whatever idealism he had about the means by which the government was “helping” his people.

One can understand why the producers of the film, which include “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, felt the need to create characters who would unite the various threads of Brown’s book and also give the audience someone to “relate to,” but the personal narratives sometimes seem, given the time constraints, awkwardly stitched together. There’s little time to give much depth to the role of Eastman’s wife, Elaine (Anna Paquin), and the romance of Charles and Elaine feels rushed and perfunctory at best. Their stories are, at times, inadequately grafted on the very real tales of suffering and resistance that “Bury My Heart” is meant to chronicle.

The other major historical character in the story is Sen. Henry Dawes, a real figure played with verve by Aidan Quinn. Dawes, as portrayed in this film, is the embodiment of the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“The Indian,” he tells his colleagues in government, has been absorbed into the American culture, “but not assimilated.” This was their central problem, he was convinced - if only the tribes would only stop living their traditional lives and begin to farm, go to church and send their children to government schools, all would be well.

It also would also help if the Sioux would take the government’s money, via a deal that Dawes negotiated, for the majority of their Black Hills land. “Compliance,” as an impatient government agent played by J.K. Simmons explains to Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg), is the key to survival.

Dawes is not purely a villain -- if anything, his central motivation is a strong desire to help the tribes of the West. And the filmmakers don’t flinch from showing the formidable Sitting Bull as a flawed, real man. He could be brutal to his own people, and didn’t mind selling his autograph or touring with the Wild West shows of the era.

Though this aesthetically gorgeous film handles the big moments extraordinarily well -- the massacre at Wounded Knee will leave you feeling stunned and nauseated -- some of the film’s smallest moments resonate the most.

There’s the proud Sitting Bull, after years of resisting handouts, standing at the door of a ration shed on a Sioux reservation, where a bored clerk treats the legendary chief with typical bureaucratic rudeness. Later, Sitting Bull barely flinches when he watches his son “hunt” a cow in a small pen with a rifle, but there’s no mistaking the humiliation in the old chief’s heart.

At one point, Dawes, who had been a mentor to Eastman, argues with the young doctor, who has been battling waves of fatal epidemics on the reservations. The senator can’t understand why Eastman isn’t grateful for Dawes' efforts, and Eastman angrily fires back that his people shouldn’t be “civilized” to the point of extinction.

The two men, both well-intentioned, remain at an impasse, and that’s an apt metaphor for this well-intentioned, often beautiful, sometimes ungainly film.

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: They promised to take our land, and they took it,” Native American chief Red Cloud says in Brown’s book.

The film version of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” could have used more time to tell that tragic story, but, as Sitting Bull might have said, would the world have had ears to hear it?

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